I won’t rehash the full text of all the changes, but here’s some bullet points from each that I found interesting. As always, MMO-Champion has all the details if you haven’t seen them already.

Shaman

Healing Rain sounds great and fits with the class very well. The 2 sec cast time is interesting, though. The targeted mechanic is going to open up some new strategic possibilities with groups.

Spiritwalker’s Grace…wow. Cast time spells not interrupted by movement is a huge mechanics change. I expect to see this ability go through several revisions to get numbers right…10s every 2 minutes is too long of a CD and duration, IMO. 5s/min seems better.

Spirit Link will be the new tool for *accidentally* killing DPS. :P

Warlock

Okay, you got green fire. Go away now. :P Question for Aff…what’s left to actually cast now that UA gets auto-refreshed? Haunt/Sbolt/CoA? This is ridiculous. What used to be THE most complex DPS rotation in the whole game in 3.0 is now approaching Arcane Mage territory.

CoA/CoD being converted to a magic effect is great. The old design (which required sacrificing a DPS curse to cover raid buffs) was a relic of vanilla and penalized good players.

I know they don’t want to, but they’re going to have to implement a regeneration mechanic for the new Soul Shards. I think fight mechanics is a better method for making locks keep shards in reserve.

Priest

A buff that increases movement speed and reduces the mana cost of instants? Hmm, I think I see a trend.

Leap of Faith (FailGrip) is a bold step. I like the concept of the idea, but there’s a ton of abuse/griefing potential as currently described…plus anything that gives DPS a disincentive to move out of the fire is bad. I can so see this conversation happening in a pug:
Ipwndlklol: why you grip me FFS it kills my DPS
Illsaveyou: you were standing in fire
Ipwndlklol: lrn 2 heal nub
This would really help on Sindragosa atm with tank swaps.

The new Holy talent that buffs your current type of spells after you cast 3 in a row (ST/AoE) is cool, and reminds me of a similar mechanic from LOTRO. Need more info though…it’s gotten some criticism already that I think is unwarranted.

Warrior

Heroic Strike no longer an “on next swing” attack, but an instant that will cost from 10-30 Rage, with damage scaled to match. Maul will work similarly. This is cool…kinda like how Ferocious Bite is used as a CP/energy dump. The question is, will DPS warriors keep jumping in fires to get more rage? (yes).

Gushing Wound: new Rend that is better DPS only if the target is moving. *TREND SENSORS FLASHING*

Hmm. “Whenever the character reaches a full 100 Rage, he or she will gain a buff that causes attacks to consume 50% more Rage and do 15% more damage for a short amount of time.” Not a fan, especially if top-end DPS requires deliberately hitting this cap. Hopefully, this is just the fallback if you’re not HS’ing enough.

Single-Minded Fury: New talent parallel to Titan’s Grip that buffs dual 1H weapons. Um, guys? Didn’t we just have a discussion about why blood had to be the DK tank tree since it was too hard to balance multiple roles in one tree?

Overall

It’s pretty clear that we’re going to be runnin’ fools in Cata. Every class so far has had at least one new spell/ability to buff movement.

Pretty much all DoTs will be buffed by haste/crit. Crit’s easy, but how do you buff a DoT with haste? According to the Priest post, they will keep the duration the same and have ticks come faster, adding extra ticks as needed. That’s cool, but how do you handle “half-ticks?” What about classes that can roll DoTs?